June 25th, 2012 by Kevin OBrien

LSI Enterprise Storage Solutions: StorageReview On-Site

Last week we were on-site with LSI at their Norcross, Georgia facility. This facility houses roughly 100 employees that span everything from their MegaRAID and high availability DAS (HA-DAS) teams, to a lab, technicians and specialists that make up the new Nytro-branded accelerated storage division. The focus of the visit centered largely around testing protocol from SAS/SATA SSDs and hard drives up to PCIe Application Accelerators with everything in-between. And what site visit would be complete without parting gifts? See what we'll be up to when we put a total of four unreleased LSI Nytro WarpDrives to work in the StorageReview lab, along with new HA-DAS equipment.

As we expand our scope of coverage in enterprise storage, one area that adds value for our readers is working on-site with storage industry leaders to collaborate on testing methodologies while also taking a peek into the future direction of the storage market at large. Advancing the way StorageReview tests storage solutions while garnering input from LSI on benchmarking protocol, gives us the chance to look at the full scope of features and benefits of LSI storage devices as well as other manufacturer's solutions on a consistent and equal ground. The net result are improvements in both synthetic benchmark design as well as an expanding suite of enterprise-grade application benchmarks to deliver a more complete picture of how high-end solutions will perform when deployed in the real world.

LSI Norcross Datacenter

With strong support from LSI, we will be working closely to introduce new application-level benchmarks that we will debut over the next several weeks. These will be applied to all enterprise storage solutions we evaluate from hard drive and SSD arrays to PCIe application accelerators. In LSI's case, this includes their entire line of storage products which is highlighted by: the Nytro WarpDrive, Nytro XD, Nytro MegaRAID, HA-DAS solutions and other leading storage technologies.

LSI Nytro WarpDrive WFH8-400

One of the first projects to come from the expanded LSI relationship is an opportunity to provide technical feedback on the unannounced and unreleased Nytro WarpDrive WFH8-400. With most of the attention currently on the Nytro PCIe 2.0 models, we were provided with alpha builds of the new PCIe 3.0 product line during our visit that will be formally launched this summer. In the coming weeks we will be putting this new Nytro WarpDrive cluster through its paces in our growing Enterprise Test Lab, working closely with LSI to provide feedback on these early production samples. Follow the build-log and benchmarking as StorageReview and a team of industry leaders press the boundaries of storage performance.

With much of the focus on LSI's Nytro WarpDrive line, let's not forget LSI has an enormous presence in the rotating media and SSD markets, with both current and emerging product lines. One of the new products we got our first glimpse of at STA 2012, is centered on high-availability DAS with Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 using LSI's MegaRAID product. As we push into the summer and fall months, StorageReview will be working closely with LSI, providing external technical analysis across their vast lineup of storage-related products.